13 June 2018

Recording

Professor Alan Spivey, Assistant Provost (learning and teaching), will be giving an update on Learning and Teaching Strategy progress, activities and events. Alan will also be running a short Q&A session – if you have any questions on Curriculum Review or Pedagogy Transformation, please do come along and ask them.

Following Alan, Dr Joanne Harris - Deputy Head of Undergraduate Medicine - will join us with a talk exploring the hidden curriculum as a way to ‘getting off the carousel’ of curricular reform. See the abstract below.

Exploring the hidden curriculum as a way to ‘getting off the carousel’ of curricular reform

Dr Joanne Harris

We are all being tasked to renew our curricula in line with the Learning and Teaching strategy, but how many of the proposed changes are actually new? Educators talk about fresh issues and a changing environment which underpin a need for reform but these will frequently be a repackaging of old themes.A mistake often made is to focus on the formal and informal curricula without considering the systems and structures in which the teaching (and learning) occur, the so-called hidden curriculum.

If we focus our curriculum change only on the formal curriculum we are doomed to what Bloom called ‘reform without change’ (1988).

In this talk I will explore what we mean by the hidden curriculum as it applies to STEM education and as curriculum reformers how we can use that awareness to ensure our curriculum change is not one more turn on the carousel.